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This book has made it its task to demonstrate that behind all neuroses the primary driving force is 'fear'. In many very interesting case-histories which all testify to the very suggestive personality and excellent healing capacities of the author, there has been constructed a new theory of neuroses which, compared to the tenets of psycho-analysis, reveals itself as superficial and most incompre-hensible, particularly by a very peculiar nomenclature.
The writer has expanded the original conception of conversion and has attempted to define the different forms of neuroses as always induced by 'conversion'. According to him there are various sorts of 'conversion'; he distinguishes a total, a partial, an inverting, a passive, an active sort of conversion and at last a 'Konversionsahnliche Disharmonie'. According to these assumptions there are various forms of neuroses which are viewed as simple conversion-acts of 'fear'. But the 'fear' has many grades, as for instance, exaltation, pavor, terror, horror, etc. The task of the therapy is to induce a 'reversion'. Now there is presented a theoretical approach to his really remarkable results which is hardly understandable by the reader. Why the author's mystic theory should give better directives for seeing the proper structure of the neuroses than the concepts of psycho-analysis, remains a sheer puzzle for us. The jargon of his theoretical explanations is a word-salad indeed.
All in all, this book is again striking evidence for the old fact that in the science and art of medicine there are many wide, often unbridgeable gaps between theory and practice. One can be a very excellent physician, a very efficient gastro-intestinal specialist, but fail totally as a theoretical surveyor of one's own successful practical experiences.